Motoring: Days of Thunder

I pull a wheelie as part of my 'work' at Motoring, as Shumi, who was then head of two-wheeler content at the magazine, looks on. The pic was clicked by the indefatigable Param

In an earlier post, I wrote about moving on from TechTree to join Motoring, an automotive monthly magazine which was, at that time, published by the Business Standard group. The story continues here.

On my very first day at work with Motoring, the team was heading out for a photoshoot of the Mitsubishi Pajero, an old-school SUV powered by a 2.8-litre diesel engine. The hulking vehicle was parked outside the Motoring office, which is on PB Marg in Lower Parel. Editor Bijoy handed over the keys to me and asked me to drive. There were other cars parked one inch ahead and one inch behind the Pajero and I slowly, carefully, manoeuvred it out of the parking slot, silently cursing the morons who had parked their cars so close to the Pajero, leaving almost no space for the massive SUV to move either forward or back. Thankfully, after a lot of twirling of the steering wheel and inching the vehicle forward and back, I was finally able to get it out of its parking slot. The team trooped in and off we went to the photoshoot location. My first drive/shoot for Motoring went off without any incident and we were back in office by afternoon. After a quick lunch of sambhar and masala dosa at a nearby joint, I spent the rest of the day just sitting around and talking to the team, trying to understand how Motoring functioned and how things worked in the office.

The Mind-Boggling Complexity of Buying a Phone in 2024

Last week, my phone died. It had served me well for a long time, so no complaints there. The only problem is, I hadn’t realised just how complicated it is, in 2024, to choose a phone if you’re buying a new one. Well, I guess it probably isn’t that complicated for the very rich. In that case, you either buy an iPhone 16 Pro Max that currently retails for Rs 1.45 lakh (if you’re an Apple fanboy) or a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (if you’re an Android loyalist) that’s currently priced at Rs 1.22 lakh. And that’s it, you’re done, you get the best of everything at a price that’s completely unaffordable for the rest of us.

Bicycle No More

From left: Me, riding my Avon Buke from school to home, in Lucknow, sometime in the mid-1980s. And my son, outside the Decathlon showroom in Greater Noida, with his new Btwin ST100 RockRider sometime in late-2021

When I was younger – in school, during my early teenage days in Lucknow – I had a bicycle, an Avon Buke, and I used it to get around everywhere. It wasn’t a fancy bicycle – it was a basic, single-speed bike, like the kind most kids used back then. It did not have a zillion gears, which seems de rigueur these days, but that did not make it any less usable – when you hit a steep incline, you just pedalled harder. No suspension, but you could always pedal around ruts and potholes instead of going through them. And no disc brakes either, but the regular brakes – essentially bits of rubber that would rub against the wheel rims when you squeezed the brake levers – were adequate for the rather modest speeds that my bicycle could do.